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Strong AiStrong AI is a form of artificial intelligence that can truly reason and solve problems; a strong AI is said to be sentient, or self-aware, but may or may not exhibit human-like thought processes. The term strong AI was originally coined by John Searle and was applied to digital computers and other information processing machines. Searle defined strong AI: - "according to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind" (J. Searle in Minds Brains and Programs. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, 1980).
General Artificial Intelligence The approach of general artificial intelligence research is to create a machine that can properly replicate the intelligence exhibited by humans in its entirety. As yet, there is very little amount of research devoted to this, however, because the assumption is that intelligence and cognition is too complex to be properly replicated in complete form. Some research is being done, however, usually by small groups of computer scientists (AGIRI) Hypothetical consequences of strong AI Some observers foresee the development of systems that are far more intelligent and complex than anything currently known. One name for these hypothetical systems is artilects. With the introduction of artificially intelligent non-deterministic systems, many ethical issues will arise. Many of these issues have never been encountered by humanity. Over time, debates have tended to focus less and less on "possibility" and more on "desirability", as emphasized in the "Cosmist" (versus "Terran") debates initiated by Hugo de Garis and Kevin Warwick. A Cosmist, according to de Garis, is actually seeking to build more intelligent successors to the human species. The emergence of this debate suggests that desirability questions may also have influenced some of the early thinkers "against". Designing systems which exceed the intelligence of human beings raises fundamental ethical considerations. Some of these issues are outlined below. - In order to be intelligent does AI need to replicate human thought, and if so, to what extent (eg. can expert systems become AI)? What other avenues to achieving AI exist?
- How do we assess the intelligence or sapience of AI?
- Can AI be defined in a graded sense (eg. with human-level intelligence graded as 1.0)? What does it mean to have a graduated scale? Is categorisation necessary or important?
- AI rights — if AI is comparable in intelligence to humans then they should have comparable rights (as corollary, if AI is more intelligent than humans, would we retain our 'rights'?)
- Can AIs be "smarter" than humans in the same way that we are "smarter" than other animals?
- Designing and implementing AI 'safeguards'. It is crucial to understand why safeguards should be considered in the first place, however to what extent is it possible to implement safeguards in relation to a superhuman AI? How effective could any such safeguards be?
- Some may question the impact upon careers and jobs (eg. there would at least be potential for the problems associated with free trade), however the more crucial issue is the wider impact upon humanity as a whole and human life.
- The Singularity
Philosophy of strong AI and conciousness See also: Artificial consciousness John Searle and most others involved in this debate address whether a machine that works solely through the transformation of encoded data could be a mind, not the wider issue of monism versus dualism (i.e., whether a machine of any type, including biological machines, could contain a mind). Searle states in his Chinese room argument that information processors carry encoded data which describe other things. The encoded data itself is meaningless without a cross reference to the things it describes. This leads Searle to point out that there is no meaning or understanding in an information processor itself. As a result Searle claims that even a machine that passed the Turing test would not necessarily be conscious in the human sense. Some philosophers hold that if Weak AI is possible then Strong AI must also be possible. Daniel C. Dennett argues in Consciousness Explained that if there is no magic spark or soul, then Man is just a machine, and he asks why the Man-machine should have a privileged position over all other possible machines when it comes to intelligence or 'mind'. Simon Blackburn in his introduction to philosophy, Think, points out that you might appear intelligent but there is no way of telling if that intelligence is real (i.e., a 'mind'). However, if the discussion is limited to strong AI rather than artificial consciousness it may be possible to identify features of human minds that do not occur in information processing computers. Many strong AI proponents believe the mind is subject to the Church-Turing thesis. This belief is problematic, because an information processor can be constructed out of balls and wood. Although such a device would be very slow and failure-prone, it could do anything that a modern computer can do. If the mind is Turing-compatible, it implies that a device made of rolling balls and wooden channels can contain a conscious mind. Roger Penrose attacked the applicability of the Church-Turing thesis directly by drawing attention to the halting problem in which certain types of computation cannot be performed by information systems yet seem to be performed by human minds. Ultimately the truth of Strong AI depends upon whether information processing machines can include all the properties of minds such as Consciousness. However, Weak AI is independent of the Strong AI problem and there can be no doubt that many of the features of modern computers such as multiplication or database searching might have been considered 'intelligent' only a century ago. Genuine strong AI Proponents of this view believe that strong AI is (or will be) real consciousness, albeit one that has not arisen naturally. The argument in favour of Genuine strong AI is essentially this: If strong AI is not real consciousness because it is exhibited by a machine then we must assume that the human is not a machine, albeit a biological one. If there is something which is not a machine about a human then it must be the soul (religion) or a magic spark (metaphysics) and science is bypassed. Some have proposed that the merger of the science of quantum mechanics and string theories or m-brane models of the universe would supply a third point or quantum link for special home for the human soul or special conscious connection. This does not block the development of artificial conscious in a quantum computer but would support it as a natural development. Therefore ordinary computers simulating conscious would not be really conscious but quantum computers would be. This functionalist view, that the human being is truly a real machine, prompts us to ask what type of machine the brain is. That the brain is a machine of the Turing type is assumed because no more powerful computing paradigm has been discovered and all that is known about the brain (admittedly not very much), in the mainstream view, does nothing to contradict the supposition. If this supposition is correct then the Church-Turing thesis applies and the possibility of Genuine strong AI being implemented on another machine of the Turing type must be admitted. It is argued that until contradictory evidence is discovered, Occam's Razor and the Copernican principle support the view that strong AI can be real consciousness and that the building of strong AI which is real consciousness is likely: The argument goes: The human being is nothing but a machine. The Church-Turing thesis states that we need new physics before two computing machines are different; by Occam's Razor, we should not posit new physics without good reason. The Copernican principle states that we should claim no special position for human beings without good reason. The only "good" reasons we have are those of arrogance: Humans are supposedly too complicated or special (or some other similar term) for their brains to be built or copied artificially, or for an alternative artificial achitecture to the brain to be truly capable of consciousness. The Genuine strong AI view assumes that anything that cannot be modelled by strong AI must be in contradiction with physicalism, but Thomas Nagel in his essay, What is it like to be a bat?, argues that subjective experience cannot be reduced, because it cannot be objectively observed, but subjective experience is not in contradiction with physicalism. In essence, Nagel is claiming subjective experience is impossible for a machine and therefore Genuine strong AI is similarly impossible. Dennett and Hofstadter's rebuttal in their book, The Mind's I, is as in the first paragraph of this section: They say that subjective experience is Nagel's call to metaphysics, his "magic spark". As is to be expected, the Not-genuine and Genuine schools of thought differ on the question of whether strong AI needs to be human-like or whether it could be of an entirely different nature. Proponents of Genuine strong AI generally hold the view that strong AI does not need to be similar to human consciousness, which, according to some, is a very questionable view and a reference is required. Some who hold that strong AI can never be really conscious (i.e., Not-genuine strong AI proponents) hold that strong AI, not being real, can only be human-like because that is the only "true" model of consciousness that we will (most likely) ever have, and that this Not-genuine strong AI will be tested based on what we know about real consciousness.
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